Do we like them?

Do we like Khaleda Zia?

Our score: 5 out of 10. A big democratic record and a court-cleared name sit against a long alliance with Jamaat and a gap in what I could read about minorities.

Khaleda Zia married army officer Ziaur Rahman as a teenager and was thrown into politics at 35, when he was assassinated in a failed coup in 1981 and she took over his party, the BNP. She spent the 1980s fighting military ruler H.M. Ershad, and with Sheikh Hasina she helped topple him in 1990. That is the formative stuff: a reluctant widow who became a movement.

She won in 1991 and became the second woman to lead a democratic government in a mostly Muslim country, after Benazir Bhutto. In that term she swapped the presidential system for a parliamentary one, lifted limits on foreign investment and made primary education compulsory and free. She lost to Hasina in 1996, then returned in a landslide in 2001.

The scandals are mostly the Hasina-versus-Zia feud in legal form. In 2018 she was convicted over about $250,000 in donations meant for an orphanage trust and was jailed; she called the charges a plot to keep her family out of politics. Her party called the cases politically motivated, and the Supreme Court acquitted her in the last corruption case in January 2025. The AP also notes allegations that her elder son ran a parallel government and was linked to corruption during her 2001 to 2006 term, which tainted that period.

On the harm test, the thing that stands out is the company she kept. She won in 1991 with the support of Jamaat-e-Islami, the country's biggest Islamist party, and governed in coalition with it again from 2001. The AP says the party has a dark past tied to the independence war. I didn't find her saying anything against LGBTQ+ people, women or the planet, but I also couldn't open enough reporting on how minorities fared under her governments to call it clean. That's a gap, not a pass.

The good stuff is real. She made primary schooling compulsory and free, and she led an opposition that spent years being jailed and sued rather than silenced. Her last stint was house arrest from 2020, and she was released after Hasina fell in 2024. Interim leader Muhammad Yunus called her a “symbol of the democratic movement.”

Nothing new on her lately: she died on 30 December 2025 and was given a state funeral. What's left is a contested legacy, and the sources for it are dominated by the Zia-Hasina rivalry. A mate asking whether we'd back her would hear: admire the courage, keep an eye on the Jamaat years.